En el nombre de Dios que continuamente insufla nueva vida en nosotros...
In the name of God who continually breathes new life into us. Amen.
Those of you who know me, know that on this day, we are entering my favorite liturgical season. I love Lent, but maybe not the Lent you’re thinking of.
The Lent I love is a season that reflects its name. “Lent” means “Spring”... literally the lengthening of days. It is a time that holds the promise of a new verdancy, a surge of the life force of God in us.
One saint who often accompanies me on my Lenten journey is Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century mystic, healer, botanist, composer, and spiritual advisor to priests and popes in her time.
Hildegard was a mystic, which is a person who has direct experience of and with the divine. Hildegard heard the voice of God not with her ears but in her spirit, as images, which she then interpreted into words. She described her visions as the voice of the living light.
Hildegard “saw” that within all creation is a Divine life force, the breath of God, ruach, as it is called in Genesis. This, she says, is why everything in creation reflects and glorifies God – because everything contains the life force of God. She calls this life force viriditas which means, greening, and it is in us humans the way sap is in a tree.
Without viriditas we would die. In fact, for Hildegard, the only sin is “drying up,” letting ourselves become arid, disconnected, and distorted, in body or spirit. This sin she calls ariditas.
Hildegard sees all of creation as one living network sustained by this life force from God. That means our duty and our privilege as stewards of God’s creation is to nurture that living network, to tend, befriend, and heal it, not to control, exploit, or dismiss any part of it as worthless or useless.
As Hildegard said in her prayer: “O Holy Spirit, … you are the mighty way in which every thing that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, is penetrated with connectedness, is penetrated with relatedness.”
Viriditas, the life force of God, fills and transforms us, continually connecting and reconnecting us to God, one another, and all of creation. And this is where we find our path for our Lenten journey.
In what ways have we become disconnected from God, ourselves, one another, or creation? Where are our lives no longer penetrated with connectedness? Where has our relatedness become distorted and destructive, whether by us or on our behalf?
When we observe a holy Lent, we do so not because we’re bad, but because we are beloved! God loves us and wants to be connected to us. Remember our prayer earlier, “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent.”
Penitence is simply the awareness of our sadness and remorse from being disconnected. The prophet Joel reminds us that our fear of punishment is a result of our disconnection because God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” So celebrate, Joel says, “Blow the trumpet ... sanctify a fast... gather the people.”
And do it now, St. Paul says, for “Now is the acceptable time.. now is the day of salvation – the day of rescue from all that has distorted our relatedness and disconnected us. Now. Today – not after we die.
This Lent, we are called to let the life force of God, the viriditas, flow freely again in us. Let there be no obstacle for us or for anyone, for we are all beloved of God, all reconciled to God through Jesus the Christ.
Our gospel affirms this, offering us a deeper truth about this connectedness. Doing things to prove to others that we are worthy, prayerful, or penitent is hypocritical. No one is more valued - or less valued – than anyone else.
Jesus says, “But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” In other words, go into a quiet place and reconnect with God. God is already there, waiting for you to come.
That’s the reward Jesus is speaking about. It isn’t a prize or honor or even a recognition. It’s reconnection through a conscious and very real co-breathing the breath of God – and that gives us life, no matter what we are confronting in the world around us.
In fact, we can’t possibly live in or respond to the world around us without this co-breathing. We will dry up, as Hildegard says. It will kill us.
We often go about our lives basically unaware that the demands and influences of the world have caused the soil of our souls to slowly but steadily dry up. Our soul-soil hardens and cracks like a dried-up river bed.
When we practice Lent, we enter into a period of self-examination that brings to our awareness just how dry we’ve become – a revelation which brings with it the realization that we are unable to irrigate ourselves. There is almost a desperateness in this moment of revelation, a deep knowledge that without this irrigation, our souls will completely dry up and turn to dust.
But our faith assures us that it is from the dust we were created in the first place. So, we trust… and we wait… through these 40 days, and 40 nights.
At our invitation, the hands of our Creator reach into the soil of our souls, breaking through the dry surface. The Almighty kneads the soil of our souls removing any hardened bits in there like anger, judgment, hatred of self or other, and other distortions of connectedness such as addictions, a desire for power, money, or praise.
Then our Creator irrigates our soul-soil with viriditas – the very life force of God – until we are ready to receive the seeds of new life being planted by our Creator. Then God smooths the surface of the soil of our soul, pats it down, sprinkles on a bit more viriditas, and asks us to wait while those divine seeds within us take root and grow.
This is Lent. Now maybe you understand why it’s my favorite liturgical season.
One final thought - and it's on fasting. If you choose to fast, please remember that fasting isn’t about food, as we heard from Isaiah last week. Fasting from food can work as a catalyst for our self-emptying, which we must do in order to reconnect with God and others, but we can accomplish that by fasting from many things: criticizing ourselves or others, complaining or harsh words. We can fast from over-exposure to the news or from doom-scrolling on social media. If any activity distracts you from your Lenten self-emptying, fast from that.
My friends, my siblings in this beautiful journey, may we all enjoy a blessed, honest, and holy Lent. Amen.
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